A Brief History of Women on U.S. $20 Bill Designs

The Harriet Tubman $20 is on the way. Here's what came before

This week the U.S. Treasury Department announced that Harriet Tubman will be featured on the next generation of $20 bills. Countless news articles have already covered the social implications, so we'll turn our attention to the aesthetics. First off: How awful is the Photoshop job being circulated by the major news outlets? I mean look at this:

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Are you kidding me? Which intern did they get to mask off Ms. Tubman's head and place it, out of scale, onto Obi-Wan Kenobi's robes? This is the best they could do?

We've yet to see a good illustration of what the new bill will look like. So let's look backwards and look at some other $20 bill designs that featured women:

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This one's from 1863. You'll notice the design is completely chaotic; the goal here was presumably not aesthetic pleasure, but to give a would-be counterfeiter a splitting headache.

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Also, look closer. This was a few decades before the French gave us the Statue of Liberty, which cemented our modern-day image of Lady Liberty as a librarian trying to illuminate a dark room while being confident in her underarm deodorant.

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But you can see, below, that the Lady Liberty on this bill doesn't play. It looks like she was hauling vegetables, then dropped them behind her and pulled out a sword and shield because something's about to go down. Her face looks like "I dare you."

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By 1880 Lady Liberty has to split the bill, so to speak, with Alexander Hamilton.

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Hamilton is presented like he's taking a 1920s mob mugshot, and the serial number right beneath doesn't help.

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Lady Liberty has swapped out her sword for some type of pole-arm, and she's upgraded her shield to a Captain-America-style one. Additionally, some prankster appears to have hung a sack over the business end of her weapon. Lastly, she's either being photobombed by an eagle or has supremely weird taste in helmets.

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By the way, the design looks less chaotic than the 1863, but they're still making it difficult for counterfeiters with these tiny details:

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By 1887, the $20 bill has swapped Lady Liberty out for her sister, Loyalty.

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Loyalty's not so much for the weapons, but the dude behind her with the scythe doesn't look like he's planning on doing farming with it.

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On the left we see what looks like cowboys duking it out, but it's in fact meant to represent the Battle of Lexington. The sole woman in this frame is tending to a wounded or dead man.

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The overall composition of the front is a bit weird. The rifleman on the left looks like he's aiming his rifle at the man with the scythe, or at Loyalty herself.

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On the back there is another woman, and in fact a woman of color, but portrayed in a scene sure to rankle today's politically-correct: It is Pocahontas being baptised, at which point she changed her name to Rebecca (I'm not making that up).

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After that, women disappeared off of the $20 bill and won't be reintroduced until we see the new Tubman bill. Speaking of which, we'd like to see a talented illustrator step up and release a better-looking rendering of what the Harriet Tubman $20 might actually look like. We previously looked at a master craftsman creating the engravings used to print money, and whatever he comes up with for the Tubman $20 is bound to look a damn sight better than the hack job above.